Beer Forum

Hi all,
So I'm considering upgrading to a 1/2 BBL Keg Kettle. This will enable me to do a full wort boil! Thing is I wanna upgrade my wort chiller as well. Since I'm doing 5 Gallon batches, I will only be filling this kettle about 1/3 of the way. What kind of wort chiller should I be looking at buying? I want an immersion chiller, but a 15.5G keg is pretty tall.

Should I be looking at building my own again? Or does anyone have a good suggestion for an immersion chiller in a keg? Thanks much.

P.S. I do plan to upgrade to large batches later, but not now.

-Steve

Jamil makes the best IM chiller ever. If you want to do it once and never agian this is the way to go.



http://www.mrmalty.com/chiller.php

Travis

This was my second use of the Jamil-style pump-whirlpool-immersion chiller (yesterday); for a ~6.5 gallon volume, tapwater temp ~72:

Boiling --> 140F in 4 min (out of the DMS zone)
140 --> 110 in 7-8 min
110 --> 84 in 15 min
84 --> 82 in 20 min

Switched to pumping icewater through the chiller (switchover time included)

82 --> 70 in 28 min
70 --> 65 in 33 min

The switchover took at least 5 min since I also had to tighten some fittings on the inlet of the IC to keep it from spraying water into the wort (I tied a towel around it to block the spray before the switchover).

Downside to this setup is that you have to buy a pump, fittings etc. Upside is that you get to buy a pump, fittings etc.

Well I use just a normal immersion chiller with my ~3 gallon kettle. Instead of a pump I dunk my trusty spoon in StarSan for 30 seconds or so, and get a manual whirlpool going, and things cool down REAL quick. Haven't had an infection yet, and I'm careful not to aerate (as much as possible).

Moving to a keg kettle and thus full wort boil I'll need to get a new chiller. I was hoping to get some info RE: a wort chiller whose copper ends are "tall enough" to get to the top of a 15.5 G keg.

I suppose I could build by own (again) Thanks!

-Steve

Ya if your not looking to do anything fancy just grab some copper and have at it. Save you old one and you can use it as a pre-chiller if you need to.

Travis

If you've priced flexible copper tubing recently, you might consider buying a chiller. Check at morebeer.com or northernbrewer.com. At least some of their's will work in a Sanke keg (mine does).

http://morebeer.com/browse.html?categor ... 19c1f2b5aa

http://www.northernbrewer.com/wort-chillers.html

Hope this works. The first 4 pics on this site are my prechiller and wort chiller, immersion. I basically took a smaller wort chiller I bought and spliced it to another 25 foot coil =50" for a prechiller. It's a tighter wrapped coil inside a bigger coil. I then bought a 50' coil for my wort chiller. Did most of this by hand so it's ugly but it did cool my wort to 71F in under 20 mins. I use straight ice in the prechiller bucket and I don't recirculate anything, just water in, water out.

http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h103/BrewNoob/

Gerard

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